Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known by the online moniker Jimbo, is an American Internet entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the for-profit web hosting company Wikia.wikipedia

Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known by the online moniker Jimbo, is an American Internet entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the for-profit web hosting company Wikia.

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.

Wales serves on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, the non-profit charitable organization that he helped establish to operate Wikipedia, holding its board-appointed "community founder" seat. In mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), a non-profit organization founded in St. Petersburg, Florida and later headquartered in San Francisco, California.

The foundation was founded in 2003 by Jimmy Wales as a way to fund Wikipedia and its sister projects through non-profit means.

Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known by the online moniker Jimbo, is an American Internet entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the for-profit web hosting company Wikia.

Its operator, Wikia, Inc., is a for-profit Delaware company founded on October 18, 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley Starling—respectively Chairman Emeritus and Advisory Board member of the Wikimedia Foundation—and headed by Andy Doyle as Interim CEO.

In January 2001, Sanger was introduced to the concept of a wiki by extreme programming enthusiast Ben Kovitz after explaining to Kovitz the slow pace of growth Nupedia endured as a result of its onerous submission process.

Wikipedia began with its launch on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.

Wales then entered the PhD finance program at the University of Alabama before leaving with a master's degree to enter the PhD finance program at Indiana University.

Notable Indiana alumni include James Watson, one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA; Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia; Robert Gates, the 22nd United States Secretary of Defense; CEO and co-founder of Siri and Viv Dag Kittlaus; award-winning author Suzanne Collins, who wrote The Hunger Games series; composer and songwriter Hoagy Carmichael; John Chambers, executive chairman and former CEO of Cisco Systems; and billionaire investor Mark Cuban.

In 1994, Wales took a job with Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm in Chicago, Illinois.

It was founded in 1987 by Oliver R. W. Pergams and Michael E. Davis. In 1994 Davis was its chief executive officer, hiring then-graduate student Jimmy Wales as research director; Wales served in this position until 1998.

It hosts some of the largest wikis outside Wikipedia, including Memory Alpha (devoted to Star Trek) and Wookieepedia (Star Wars). Another service offered by Wikia was Wikia Search, an open source search engine intended to challenge Google and introduce transparency and public dialogue about how it is created into the search engine's operations, but the project was abandoned in March 2009.

Wikia Search was a short-lived free and open-source web search engine launched by Wikia, a for-profit wiki-hosting company founded in late 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley.

On January 15, 2001, with Larry Sanger and others, Wales launched Wikipedia—a free, open content encyclopedia that enjoyed rapid growth and popularity; as Wikipedia's public profile grew, he became the project's promoter and spokesman.

It was co-founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Sanger hired as editor-in-chief.

In early 2016, Wikipedia editors perceived the WMF's Knowledge Engine project as a conflict of interest for Wales, whose business Wikia might benefit from having the WMF spend a lot of money on research in respect to search.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales allowed that the KE might in time also include academic and open access sources in its search results.

It hosts some of the largest wikis outside Wikipedia, including Memory Alpha (devoted to Star Trek) and Wookieepedia (Star Wars). Another service offered by Wikia was Wikia Search, an open source search engine intended to challenge Google and introduce transparency and public dialogue about how it is created into the search engine's operations, but the project was abandoned in March 2009.

In February 2005, Memory Alpha switched hosting servers and joined Wikia, a free for-profit wiki-hosting company started by Wikimedia Foundation board members Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley.

Then-chairperson of the foundation Florence Devouard and former foundation interim Executive Director Brad Patrick denied any wrongdoing by Wales or the foundation, saying that Wales accounted for every expense and that, for items for which he lacked receipts, he paid out of his own pocket; in private, Devouard upbraided Wales for "constantly trying to rewrite the past".

Devouard joined the board of Wikimedia Foundation in June 2004 as Chair of the Board of Trustees, succeeding Jimmy Wales.

In May 2010, the BBC reported that Wales had relinquished many of his technical privileges on Wikimedia Commons (a Wikipedia sister project that hosts much of its multimedia content) after criticism by the project's volunteer community over what they saw as Wales's hasty and undemocratic approach to deleting sexually explicit images he believed "appeal solely to prurient interests".

After this was reported in the media, Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation which hosts Commons, used his administrator status to delete several images without discussion from the Commons community.

On December 5, 2013, Wales was awarded the UNESCO Niels Bohr Medal in Copenhagen, Denmark at a conference on "An Open World" to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Niels Bohr's atomic theory. His presentation on "Wikipedia, Democracy and the Internet" emphasised the need to expand Wikipedia into virtually all the languages of the world. The "Wikipedia Zero" initiative was beginning to prove successful in encouraging telecommunications companies to provide children in the developing world with free access to Wikipedia for educational purposes. Wales was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013.

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia was one of the three celebrities who were presented with the medal for 2013 at an event in honour of the 100th anniversary of Bohr's atomic model.

In May 2017, he said on Quora that he is a Centrist and a Gradualist and believes "that slow step-by-step change is better and more sustainable and allows us to test new things with a minimum of difficult disruption in society."

The Quora community includes some well-known people such as Jimmy Wales, Richard A. Muller, Justin Trudeau, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the late Adrián Lamo, as well as many current and former professional athletic personalities.